AUGMENTED TRAINING FOR WELDING: A GLOBAL SUCCESS STORY

Welding is necessary in many industries (Oil&Gas, Infrastructure, Automotive, Energy, Aeronautics, Naval, Mining, etc.) and today there is a huge skilled welder shortage almost in any country in the world, from emerging economies to USA, where more than 300.000 new welders will be required till 2020.

Most of young people today are not thinking in welding or other CTE trades professions for their future. Most of them are conducted by society to university. But the fact is that we have many university degrees students that can not find a quality job, while industry is facing one of the biggest skills gap that we can remember.

This is becoming a big problems for students that can not find a well payed job, for teachers that cannot get their students motivated, for industries that can not find the qualified welders they need and for governments that are not getting the best return on the public money investment in vocational education.

In Seabery we think welding training can be much more attractive and improve the results. We have developed Soldamatic Augmented Training technology, an educational technology platform combining Augmented Reality and Simulation to make welding training more attractive and get to train more welders, in less time, better qualified, safer, cheaper, reducing environmental impact and promoting women participation to traditionally male industries.

We have partnered Spanish Welding Association as official International Institute of Welding (IIW) courses publisher and certificators worldwide, to offer official IIW programs and certification paths in our Soldamatic platform. The first experiences are showing that with Soldamatic Augmented Training we are certifying36% more International Welders, reducing 56% of welding workshop time and saving 68% of welding booth costs on average.

The same nobody can understand pilots being trained on theory and then moving directly to real planes, why shall we apply that old model to welding or other CTE skills training any more?